Brandes in the Czech-speaking World: Dismissed as a Critic, Embraced as a Name

Abstract

In our contribution, we explore the Czech-speaking discourse related to Georg Brandes in the Bohemian Lands in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, which means before and shortly after Czechs gained their independence from Austria-Hungary in 1918. Our research of archival sources, especially periodicals and private letters, enables us to confidently claim that the impact of Brandes’s criticism on the Czech arts was rather insignificant. At the same time, the sources give a clear picture that the Czech-speaking intelligentsia were interested in using Brandes’s symbolic capital to promote their struggle for Czech cultural autonomy. Thus, it was not Brandes’s works that can be considered influential in the Czech context but his persona. This strategy of using Brandes’s symbolic capital mirrors his own efforts to be viewed as an international intermediary. Finally, we explore the East-West dynamics in Brandes’s relationship with Czechs and vice versa, and here, we identify a considerable asymmetry